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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS TRAVEL AND THE MIND TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Dr Richard Weight Producer: Mukul Devichand Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 09.07.07 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 12.07.07 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN732/07VT1032 Duration: 27’44” Taking part in order of appearance: Michael Palin Travel writer and TV presenter Sophie Chalk International Broadcasting Trust Jo Clinton-Davis Controller of Popular Factual Programmes, ITV Professor Can Seng Ooi Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School Professor John Urry Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University Mark Ellingham Founder of the Rough Guides series Dr Tim Edensor Reader in Cultural Geographapy, Manchester Metropolitan University Professor John Walton University of Central Lancashire Vice President, International Commission for the History of Travel and Tourism William Dalrymple Travel Writer Also featuring: Graham Holliday www.noodlepie.com Raymond Diski CEO, Rainbow Tours Louise O’Riordan Quintessentially bespoke travel service WEIGHT: Once upon a time Michael Palin and his film crew could go abroad without much chance of bumping into his compatriots. Today millions can afford to follow Palin’s tracks, so what’s his advice for them? PALIN: I think the most important thing when you travel is to have as much of an open mind as possible; if you can almost to forget what you’ve read in the guidebooks, however good; to forget what the people who went there three years ago told you you should go and see; to forget that you are being sort of controlled as you travel, and in some ways just take the lane that no-one else takes. The one thing that worries me most of all is that people are cocooned sometimes and tours say we will do everything for you, even think for you. WEIGHT: 68 million trips abroad over the last year - that’s double the number a decade ago. The popularity of Europe and North America is falling, but travel to the rest of the world is rising, by almost a million more trips last year. So travel is changing fast but can it change us? There’s debate about the damage it does to the environment but are there social benefits that justify the cost? On this week’s Analysis, I’ll be looking at whether these new frontiers are expanding our horizons or merely confirming our prejudices. Let me take you on holiday – first stop: Soweto. (Music) DISKI: We specialise in South Africa in township homestays. WEIGHT: What’s a township homestay exactly? DISKI: Well you would go into Soweto. WEIGHT: Soweto? DISKI: Yes. You would stay overnight in somebody’s … well say somebody’s shack. It’s actually more than a shack because it has guestrooms. The thing that we do that’s most similar is our tours in Rwanda. The vast majority of people who go to Rwanda are going there to see the mountain gorillas, but we also encourage people to make a tour. They visit the genocide, various genocide memorials, particularly Marumbi where there’s a thousand bodies lying in school rooms. And the guy who shows you round has got a hole in his head where he was shot. WEIGHT: Raymond Diski of independent travel company Rainbow Tours. Not everyone’s holiday guide has a bullet hole in his head but does the emergence of this type of tourism signal global awareness? Let’s start the investigation in our living room because it’s our choices at home that truly reveal how we live. Sophie Chalk is from the lobby group International Broadcasting Trust, which has been surveying how many hours of factual TV programmes about other countries there are on British countries each year. CHALK: The output of international factual programming that doesn’t include news and current affairs has risen by 15%, so it has gone up. But within that, there’s a whole new area of programming. Entertainment shows - so I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Me, Celebrity Love Island, those type of shows that are actually filmed in foreign locations, therefore they qualify as international programmes but they really don’t tell you anything about the location they’re in - those accounted for 23%. Brits Abroad, reality travel programmes, accounted for 25%. Basically 50% of factual international programming in 2005 didn’t tell you very much about the countries that were being visited. WEIGHT: Do you think that people can learn about the world from that kind of format? CHALK: I do, yes. All these programmes, these entertainment formats could tell us about the wider world without it being preachy, without it being boring, without losing viewers. I think you’ve just got to have the imagination to do it well. WEIGHT: According to her report, in 2005 (the last year surveyed) three quarters of ITV1s developing country programming consisted of the reality show Celebrity Love Island, set in Fiji. Jo Clinton Davis is a Controller of Popular Factual Programmes at ITV. I suggested that the commissioners are missing a trick. CLINTON DAVIS: I don’t think the role of something like Celebrity Love Island, I don’t think that’s its job, but I think there’s definitely a need for and I think there’s an interest in the commissioning community to commission programmes abroad that remain accessible entertaining and informative. So it would be interesting to know what’s in your mind’s eye; that you could tell me and the Analysis audience what the trick is that we might be missing. WEIGHT: For example, do you think that we could be fusing current affairs programmes more with travel programmes? CLINTON DAVIS: Thank you for the idea. We’ll talk about it afterwards. WEIGHT: I didn’t get a job offer from Jo Clinton Davies but in any case the medium’s moved on. Celebrity Love Island’s been off air for two years now and there’s a raft of newer programmes, like the BBC’s Tribe and ITV’s 21 Up South Africa, which are trying to display cultures in entertaining formats. Take Last Man Standing on BBC3. NARRATOR: The Kalapalo believe one way to gain strength is to bleed. Scream like a girl and you don’t get to fight. WEIGHT: In this show a group of British and American men are pitted against foreign opponents in remote places. NARRATOR: What Brad doesn’t know is that scraping is just the start. Next they’re going to rub his open wounds with salt and chillis. Nice! WEIGHT: It might be ‘nice’ but what does our boys’ endurance tell us about the Kalapalo people except that they’re ‘well hard’? A fair bit actually – but the programme’s tight format limits the scope for subtlety. That’s because many TV chiefs want high ratings and see entertainment as the only way to do it. But if you look in bookshops and online, the traffic tells a different story. Mark Ellingham founded the Rough Guides, which have been encouraging the inquisitive tourist for twenty-five years. ELLINGHAM: The Internet has allowed people to explore niche interests perhaps in a more effective way than TV has. I mean I think there’s been a decline in serious TV documentaries generally. I think for a lot of younger people TV just isn’t particularly relevant anymore. WEIGHT: So do you think interest in foreign affairs is actually going up? ELLINGHAM: It wouldn’t surprise me. I think Britain today is a vastly more tolerant and cosmopolitan place than it was twenty-five years ago and that may be demonstrated sometimes with very small things like how we eat, where we go on holiday, but travel probably has contributed something in that process. WEIGHT: Look around your shopping centres, at the flatpack furniture stores, the coffee bars and sushi restaurants. The sight of a Brit curiously prodding an avocado in a supermarket as if a war has been lost is largely a thing of the past. Social historian Professor John Walton of the University of Central Lancashire. WALTON: I think it’s clear that the development of popular tourism to the Mediterranean and beyond since the 1960s has made a lot of people more cosmopolitan in terms, for example, of the enormous growth of wine drinking and the enormous diversity of cuisines that are now available in Britain. Part of this is migrants bringing stuff with them and marketing them effectively, but partly it’s exposure gradually to different ways of eating on foreign holidays. Travel both ways - both travel on holiday and migration into Britain - is eroding iron clad certainties for a lot of people. WEIGHT: Whether we realise it or not, our mental white cliffs are being eroded because we’re leaving our islands so often. But I wonder whether exotic trips are catering for the acquisitive as much as the inquisitive. Let’s go on holiday again, to Antarctica. (Music) O’RIORDAN: One thing we organised for a group of twelve of our members recently was a bespoke trip to Antarctica set up in a most magnificent camp. I mean it was the height of luxury. The interior was done by Dunhill. Their days were filled with trekking around different environments, being helidropped on areas of Antarctica where nobody had been before. They would be offered barbecued oriental Norwegian salmon served on a bed of Wasabi mash and grilled asparagus, so it was hardly camping it rough. WEIGHT: Can it also be a real engagement with the world at the same time? O’RIORDAN: It can only end with a good result. You have a person who maybe has gone to the Middle East and therefore relates back to his dinner party guests the different way of life that he’s experienced. It just heightens curiosity. WEIGHT: Louise O’Riordan of Quintessentially, one of the growing number of bespoke travel companies who help people design their own holidays. Wasabi mash and ice caps make for good dinner party tales. But in the Antarctic there’s no local culture, indeed no local people. When there are, can we design a holiday that enables us to connect with them, especially when our foreign hosts are not always what they seem? Professor Can Seng Ooi studies Western tourists from the other side, looking at how they experience places like Asia. OOI: In Shanghai there is a Chinatown and of course that is very strange because Shanghai is right in the middle of China, but there is a garden called Ye- Yen, which is actually a replica of a traditional Sung Dynasty garden. WEIGHT: That’s amazing. So it’s a Chinatown within China? It’s a sort of bubble within a bubble? OOI: Plastic fantastic Chinatown. WEIGHT: If plastic fantastic culture is the limit of what we can experience in Shanghai then the cultural exchange rate won’t be as favourable as the monetary one, especially in developing countries that depend on tourism. So what sort of experience are we paying for? OOI: Tourists are actually in a quest to search for things they are familiar with, not things that are just different. There is exchange of information and knowledge, there’s no doubt about that, but the type of information and knowledge that has been exchanged is rather superficial. WEIGHT: Superficial in what sense exactly? OOI: Superficial in the sense that they are using their own cultural background to understand the other society. Tourists have certain expectations and they have been taught to search out for certain icons and certain attractions. For example, Chinatown in Singapore was destroyed in the 60s and 70s in the name of development, but because the Western tourists wanted to see a more Chinese or more oriental Singapore, the Singapore government has decided to rebuild and conserve Chinatown. WEIGHT: Chinatowns, like Irish bars, everywhere we go. Disguising signs of modernity has been a feature of tourist sites everywhere since the 19th century. But the re-orientalising of Asia that Professor Ooi describes, shows just how far countries will go to fit the expectations of today’s tourist. What’s being created as we travel more is not a concrete exchange of knowledge but an ersatz global tourist culture that hovers like a vapour trail between our reality and that of our hosts before disappearing from view. If authentic travel is impossible can we learn anything from the experience? Let’s go to Vietnam and find out. (Music) HOLLIDAY: Especially since the md-90s, early 90s, tourism has grown in Vietnam year on year. If you go to the Kuchi Tunnels, which is where the Vietcong used to be camped, a lot of them, underground about fifty kilometres or so from Saigon, you can fire an AK47 or a pistol or an M60 machine gun for I think it’s a dollar a bullet, and that’s kind of tagged onto the end of many tours. So you go to see tunnels, which most of the tunnels are actually enlarged for Western tourists because Vietnamese people, especially during the war, the Vietcong were quite malnourished really as a nation, Northern Vietnamese. WEIGHT: Graham Holliday, a long-time Saigon-based blogger. The fact that flows of people through these macabre spaces are maintained by digging Vietcong tunnels wider for corpulent Westerners, is perhaps the ultimate example of the world being tailored to fit the tourist. So-called ‘dark tourism’ to sites of death and destruction is on the increase. Almost twenty years ago Professor John Urry of Lancaster University coined the idea that tourists are voyeurs who consume shallow images of the places they visit. But here’s a surprise. He now sees signs of genuine political engagement with the new destinations. URRY: The world changes to provide new kinds of destinations and one sort of destination are destinations to death and disease and dying, but at the same time it’s somehow significant that you have a kind of global commemoration with very large numbers of people from diverse cultures turning up, being present, seeing it for themselves. WEIGHT: Are you saying that that construction of memory can be part of a greater engagement with contemporary politics? URRY: Yes, I think it’s absolutely that. For example the history of Jewish-ness in the contemporary world is significantly bound up with the proliferation of Holocaust museums and Holocaust sites. WEIGHT: Over sixty museums commemorate the Holocaust from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires; this may show that tourists can engage with history even when its packaged for them. But do we want this as much as the sun lounger and poolside bar? South African tour operator Raymond Diski promised customers ‘responsible tourism,’ and on the cover of his first brochure in 1998 he had a picture of Nelson Mandela. RAINBOW TOURS DISKI: I think the brochure was a bit of a turnoff. Although we’re known as a specialist in cultural tours, 95% of our clients want a luxury Safari and then flop on the beach, warm sea, soft sand. We issued another brochure a few months later, which had a picture of Victoria Falls on the cover, and that got things going a bit more. And then we just sort of bit the bullet and we had a cheetah on the third cover and then we were in business. WEIGHT: Can you really blame his customers? Most people, whether they’re a postal worker or a telecoms analyst in the City, only have a few weeks off work each year. When time is such a precious currency in the accelerated world that most of us now inhabit, convenience is our priority. Could it be this lack of time and not a lack of will that stops us broadening our minds? Some insist that there is a better way to travel. Rough Guide founder Mark Ellingham. ELLINGHAM: We can travel slower; I think less weekend breaks or going to Goa for a week. If we go for longer, it’s obviously good for environmental reasons taking fewer flights. But I think you have a different attitude if you travel slower. You’re treating the country in less of a sort of consumerist way. I think you know we go and we consume whatever there is and so the canoeing trip and the white water rafting and the climb in the mountain and it doesn’t leave a lot of space for actually just getting to grips with the place where you’re at. WEIGHT: Guidebooks like his were inspired by the hippy trails of the 1960s but today they appeal to gap year students, adults on sabbaticals and retired couples, who have more time to spare however long their hair. Is there any concrete evidence that some travel better than others? Next stop the Taj Mahal. (Music) EDENSOR: When I was at the Taj Mahal - this was in the mid-90s - I was watching the different things that tourists did there. The Taj Mahal of course is an incredibly beautiful place. The two groups of European and North American travellers that we find there are the package tourists and backpackers. The package tourists have a very frustrating time at the Taj Mahal. They’ve come to India primarily to see the Taj Mahal, yet they only have between one and one and a half hours to visit the place. The time that they spend there tends to be highly focused, highly charged in terms of collecting as many photographs from as many different angles as they possibly can, but at the same time trying to gaze at the building. And when they’re whisked away by the guide, when the guide says right, come on folks, it’s time to go, they tend to get very, very frustrated and often argue with the guide. They feel that they haven’t had enough time to capture what they regard as the highlight of their visit. The backpackers, on the other hand, have all day if they want to hang around the site. Of course they’re not operating according to a very tight schedule or timetable and they will typically just walk into the Taj Mahal, hang around, maybe write diaries, chat. In many ways, backpackers follow a whole set of habitual procedures. However though, I would say that by virtue of the fact that they stay in particular spaces that there are always opportunities to meet people in surprising and unusual ways. WEIGHT: Dr. Tim Edensor of Manchester Metropolitan University, whose study at the Taj reveals how people consume famous places. Does the tourist merely gaze while the traveller experiences or are we searching for a Holy Grail that eludes us all? The distinction between traveller and tourist is a key axiom of our culture. At its core is the notion of authenticity and a belief that all you need is time and the right attitude to meet people and grasp the true nature of their way of life, whether for its own sake, or better to understand our own. OOI: They think that they are having a more authentic experience. I was one of them. WEIGHT: Former backpacker, now Professor, Can Seng Ooi, thinks that genuine contact with locals is a fantasy. OOI: People do feel that they are getting the authentic experience when they talk to locals and that is … I think is an illusion. That is because locals do respond to foreigners. They will talk to them in a way that foreigners will actually understand them. And besides that, a society is necessarily complex, heterogeneous. Whatever conversations that they may have with locals will be quite limited. If we actually do any backpacking trips, you realise that almost all of them will have the Lonely Planet guidebook and most of them will be doing the circuit. In fact it has all been mediated for them. WEIGHT: Is it a more sophisticated mediation? OOI: Well it seems to be that way, but I think if they choose to actually reflect on their own experiences they will realise that it’s not authentic and it’s not very sophisticated at all. WEIGHT: The quest for authenticity supposes that all foreign countries have an essential nature which the discerning traveller can experience. Of course, there’s plenty of difference for us to discover. But this is a rather old-fashioned way of looking at culture and can often obscure our vision. Because if we go in search of a unique character in foreign “peoples,” we can miss the things that we have in common with them. So why do we always seek the authentic? Social historian Professor John Walton argues that the scramble for more exotic locations is for some a way of escaping the hordes. He describes a new “pleasure periphery” in which British social conflicts are being exported around the globe. WALTON: I think the pleasure periphery today is spreading through Thailand, almost hopping from island to island. Thailand in recent years has been a kind of frontier area for the pleasure periphery because, on the one hand, you’ve had new beaches being opened out, discovered by backpackers, the next wave following on. It’s been happening in South India, for example, as well. At the same time as you’ve had that kind of moving frontier, you’ve also had the development of really highly commercial resorts like Phuket and Pattaya. WEIGHT: So Thailand is a battleground in the British class war in a sense? WALTON: I think what’s happening is that age old differences and conflicts are actually being acted out in new places because I think that the British class system is certainly not dead and it expresses itself much more convincingly through tourism and attitudes to tourism than in any other respect, and the kinds of conflicts over access to and use of desirable space that have been familiar in British seaside resorts, for example, from the late 19th century are being spread across the world and given added complicating dimensions by the international nature of the resorts that Britons now frequent. WEIGHT: Trouble is, the world’s frontiers are not endless and at some point escapees have to turn and face their pursuers. And where do they hide when they get back to Blighty? The snobbery towards some types of travel makes it harder to see that the best souvenirs we import are lasting snapshots of the unique experiences we’ve had. If travel is really making us more cosmopolitan, it must do more than give us a taste for exotic wine or food. It must affect our way of seeing. And the best place to test whether that’s actually happening is – well, arrivals. WEIGHT: I’m standing in the arrivals area at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 and I can see a lot of tired and smiling faces coming through the arrivals gate. In front of me is the electronic notice board with flights coming in from Lagos, Gothenburg, Beijing, Delhi, all over the world and I’m here to ask people what they’ve gained from their experience of travel. Where have you just come from? 1ST TRAVELLER: Egypt. WEIGHT: Egypt, okay. And why did you choose to go to Egypt? 1st TRAVELLER: Because it was 40 degrees centigrade, there was no rain, guaranteed sunshine and I had to book it within a week. WEIGHT: And can you tell us who the President of Egypt is? 1st TRAVELLER: No. That’s really awful. My mother would be appalled that I said that. (Laughs) Whoever he is, they’re not very happy with the President because the country’s really rundown. It’s certainly broadened my mind to the developing world and you know they’re so hungry there for new opportunities you know that we take for granted over here. 2ND TRAVELLER: We’ve been on a cruise: Treasures of Germany and the Baltic. We didn’t really know much about the Baltic at all, but we really saw quite a few places in a short space of time and it was fantastic. I mean I lived abroad as soon as I left college and I would encourage my daughter to do the same, and I think we should be more European as well. I think we get very insular. We get quite put to shame when we go to these countries because everybody speaks English. 3rd TRAVELLER: I’ve just come back from Japan and we stayed in Osaka. I was living in Japan for nine years before I came back to the UK ten years ago. WEIGHT. So why did you choose to go this time? 3rd TRAVELLER: Just to visit some relatives of my wife who is Japanese. WEIGHT: I’ve been in arrivals now for about an hour and I’ve approached a dozen people. This may not be a typical British airport, but I’ve been amazed at just how connected people seem to be with the rest of the world. I expected to meet a lot of people who’d just been away for sun and sea and met no-one like that, and it seems to me that this stereotype of the British traveller just doesn’t hold here. WEIGHT: As the environmental critique of aviation mounts, these new arrivals may justify all our journeys. Heathrow’s bookshops are well-stocked with the works of acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple, who divides his time between Britain and India. He thinks critics should stop ticking off the tourist. DALYRYMPLE: I think it’s very easy to be snotty about mass tourism. In my own life, I’ve seen Goa, which I used to go to in the late 80s and early 90s and there were a few hippies lying around on the beach. That has now become a mass tourism destination and I’ve seen small areas of that destroyed. But I think it can only do good for people to see the world beyond their own native shores and it has to do something to broaden the mind. For every bus full of louts who are horribly sick in some ghastly tourist resort, there will always be people who go out and explore and develop an interest in a place. And I really believe that there is a direct correlation between the amount of people who refuse to believe the lies that were fed our politicians before the Iraq War, the million people who miraculously turned up on the streets and said no, this is not what we want, and the number of Brits who go off on package holidays to countries like Egypt or Turkey, all these Muslim countries even if it is superficial, even if it is on the package tour to the pyramids. WEIGHT: We can’t know if coach trips to the pyramids drove opposition to the Iraq war, but other events show that we are becoming more aware of our global connections - for example the multi-national reaction to the Asian Tsunami which killed tourists and locals alike, and which reminded us all that nature can burst the most well-constructed bubble. Michael Palin: PALIN: Oh I think travel is full of snobbery, it really is. You know travel used to be the province of the sort of well bred, wealthy English man - not woman usually, although we’ve had some brilliant women travellers - but you know I’m talking about people who would visit Europe and go round the world. They had money, they had power, they had privilege. We tend to look now with horror at groups going everywhere. And I do agree with that - I don’t want to travel in a group particularly myself. When I’ve been to countries in Europe recently and you go to capitals like Gdansk or Prague or somewhere like that and you see large groups of Brits all dressed as bananas walking down the street getting pissed, I think well you know what are they learning? What are they getting out of this? A And more to the point, what do the Czechs feel about all this? But I mean you know it’s up … All I’m saying is it’s up to the individual. Maybe someone who’s dressed as a banana one night might the next morning decide to get up at 3 a.m. to see the sun rise over the cathedral in Old Town Square in Prague or something like that and get a huge amount of that, but never dare tell his friends when he comes back. (Laugh) WEIGHT: Dressing as a banana can bear fruit. As we set off on holiday, let’s accept that the quest for authenticity is often a futile one; and remember that even the most sanitised pathways can take us to fresh viewpoints. Satellite dishes on the rooves of a Moroccan mountain village doesn’t mean its been spoiled. Other countries, like ours, are a unique fusion of customs, and what we have in common with them is that hybridity. So let’s embrace that, and stop freighting travel with the need to improve ourselves and others. Then we can really start to enjoy it.